ABSTRACT
How can we understand publicness under political conditions where the public sphere, including public education, is appropriated by an undemocratic state power? And what are the possibilities for reclaiming publicness in general and publicness of education in particular under such political predicament? To answer these questions, we explore the publicness of education from the vantage point of new tyrannies of contemporary East/Central Europe. We describe three empirical examples from our research with Polish parents and their encounters with state-controlled public schools to show how the tyranny’s dominant publicness relies on exclusionary ideologies of belonging and restriction of access to the public good. Drawing on the critical democratic tradition of public philosophy in the study of the public sphere which understands publicness primarily as the diversity of practices of civic engagement, we show how this exclusionary logic is challenged through citizens’ counter-hegemonic and counter-public disagreement and action. Furthermore, through the prism of Wittgenstein’s and Foucault’s work on language, which stresses the fundamental publicness of language, we challenge the binary opposition of the private/public, which masks the workings of hegemonic state power. Questioning these established binaries allows us to move beyond conventional critiques of educational neoliberalism towards rethinking what the new publicness of education can be (not only) under the conditions of new tyrannies.
